


she'd prefer a snifter of ghost-essence

by AVMabs



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Christmas, Drama, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Ghosts, Hospitals, Romantic Comedy, but i promise there's more to it than 'aye mustang's dead lets have some wkd', corporeal ghosts, in fact wkd doesn't come into it at all, yes the central conceit of this is that roy is dead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 12:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8979055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVMabs/pseuds/AVMabs
Summary: After Roy Mustang dies in Riza Hawkeye's care at the very beginning of advent, that should be the very end of the story.  There's just something about being a Christmas Ghost that keeps him around, though.-otherwise known as the one where riza wanted to spend a quiet christmas with her dog and her potted plant but ended up babysitting a christmas ghost.





	

**Author's Note:**

> HI this won't be done by christmas but enjoy it anyway

** Prologue: A Strange Business **

Dying was a strange business.  The dying looked odd, much smaller than they should have, with tubes feeding into their mouths and arms – and Roy Mustang was no exception to this.  He had approximately one tube or machine for each bodily function, except digestion, for which he had three, and thinking, for which he had none.  On one side of his bed, a machine told anyone who cared to look his pulse, his breathing rate, his oxygen saturation, and much more besides.  Most people, including the bespectacled man at his bedside, did not care to look.

A cursory glance out of the window told the bespectacled man that it was night.  This was a surprise to him: he had expected morning already to have come.  He had been at Roy’s bedside since finishing work for the day, which felt like a very, very long time.  Just to make sure that he was not, in fact, stuck in a time morph, the bespectacled man glanced at the clock in time to see the little red hand, which was counting seconds (seconds, in hospital time, were actually slightly longer than seconds, the bespectacled man noted), flit onto the ‘12’.

His phone buzzed from inside his trousers, then began to make a noise.  He fished it out of his back pocket and glanced at the screen, which said: ‘VISITING HOURS OVER.  GO HOME.  TUCK ELICIA IN.’  He sighed, which was not his usual response to familial obligation, which – in truth – was rather an important aspect of his life.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket, then found himself caught in pause.  He wondered how Roy could look so dead to the world with so much whirring around him. 

No use wondering. 

“I’ve got to kiss Elicia goodnight.”  He stared down at Roy, looking very sad indeed.  Somehow, he managed to get a grasp on a bit of hand that didn’t have wires hooked to it.  “I’ll be by tomorrow morning.  Be alive.”

The atmosphere held something uncanny: nothing could possibly rejuvenate the dying man in the bed, nor mask the sadness in the bespectacled man’s voice – yet the bespectacled man seemed to be struggling with the dim air of the room.  He was losing.

The bespectacled man pulled the hospital door closed.

Roy moaned.

*

Dying was a strange business.  Roy, who was definitely dying, thought himself a very good authority on the subject.  He had allowed his eyes to flicker open in the last hour or so – or, he thought he had, but nobody had quite noticed. 

This was because his eyes were not actually open: he had begun to transcend.

Enough of that, though, because it isn’t important.

Roy’s not-eyes were showing him Maes (Maes is the real identity of the ‘bespectacled man’) and a doctor who he vaguely recognised as the one after the one who had told him he had pneumonia.  The one who told him he had pneumonia told him that an active young man such as himself should have no problem recovering from pneumonia, and then Roy had stopped breathing. 

This one, with all her blonde hair and pretty hazel eyes, had not fucked about with telling him that he was literally choking to death on the fluid in his lungs.

She had followed it up by sticking a needle in his ribcage, which he had not liked at all.

Judging by what Roy could see, she wasn’t fucking about with whatever she was telling Maes.  He expected the doctor was relaying his estimated time of death.

He was right.

Maes’s hand met the wall.  That nice, floaty haze that Roy had been watching him through disappeared.  Maes’s hand slipped down with a sluggish, wet _thwack_ noise and dangled limply at his side. 

“You’re an asshole, Roy,” he said quietly.

If I, the author, had not just changed perspective to account for Roy’s new unconsciousness, Roy would be put-off by this comment, as he had always rather been under the impression that the dying should receive sympathy. 

The doctor took one, tiny step forwards.  “If I might suggest,” she began, then stopped.  Her hand rose to meet the side of her neck, but she stopped it from completing its task.  Had Maes not been caught up in his grief, he might have considered this a little more closely, people person as he was.  “Stay with him.”

Maes knew better than to argue with that tone – and he had not planned to leave Roy anyway, besides. 

He could not look at the doctor, so he looked at his reflection in the window instead.  He was pale, ghoulish: the product of too many sleepless nights and too little food.  “Of course,” he said hoarsely.

Then, very slowly, as if he had aged 50 years in the microscopic pause between consciousness and action, he walked over to Roy’s bed, and sat down next to him.  His injured hand rested on his knee.  His knuckles were already swelling, blood oozing sluggishly from them.

“Please, let me know when you’re ready to have your hand seen to.”

And then there was only Maes and Roy, and Roy was only sort of there, given that he didn’t have much time left.  Very lonely.  Unfavourable circumstances.

*

Dying was a strange business.

Roy was quite sure he had passed on, now – or was passing on.

The monitors next to him were losing it, beeping and blaring wildly, and he was sort of aware – though he didn’t quite know whether it was subconscious awareness wrought by expectation – of green.  And numbers.  He didn’t really know what the numbers meant –

which didn’t really matter, because he was out again, after that.

**Author's Note:**

> next chapter soon hopefully
> 
> love u  
> al


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